Once upon a time, this would be a very stupid question, but based on
Apple's website I am unclear as to how much - if any - documentation
actually comes with FileMaker 7 Developer.

Has anyone here ordered FileMaker 7 Developer - and did it come with a
decent amount of documentation? I might even be happy with PDF's, but
printed manuals would be nice.

majqa wrote:
It definitely comes with PDFs, and there were some manuals, but I forget
how extensive they are. (I don't have the box handy).

In article <d2cg71$of1$2 (AT) zcars129 (DOT) ca.nortel.com>, Kevin Hayes
<me (AT) here (DOT) com> wrote:

Almost no software comes with proper extensive "learn how" manuals
these days. For that you need to go to third-party books at the big
bookshops / webstores - "FileMaker for Dummies" perhaps. )

Helpful Harry
Hopefully helping harassed humans happily handle handiwork hardships ;o)

Helpful Harry wrote:

Thanks for the input. Actually...

I've had a fair amount of experience with FileMaker several years ago,
namely FileMaker 5.5. I was in a hurry and wanted to get an up and
running prototype of a database for particular project that I had in
mind crica 2001/2002 for the company I was with. Because I was very,
very short on time, on a whim I bought a copy of FileMaker 5.5 (it was
pretty cheap back then as one could qualify for "upgrade" pricing if you
proved ownership of MS Access) and figured I'd try it out. I never had
any big ambitions for it other than to show some forms to the PHB's,
kinda make the thing sort-of work well enough to pull off the concept,
and lay the groundwork for coding it in Delphi (my second geek love at
the time)... and well...

Long story short - that prototype is STILL in operation and led to site
license of FileMaker Pro and Server. I'm no longer with that company,
but the database, despite some funky warts, manages hundreds of
thousands of records (maybe even millions at this point) and might even
be described as "mission critical" to the company. I can't even begin
to describe how much I was able to get out of FileMaker - and how FAST I
was able to do it.

The drawback - it took me a weekend to put it together and maybe another
2 weeks of tweaking it as the company continued to play with the
"prototype." As it turned out I never got to write the thing in Delphi
as I had originally planned, which was a bit of a bummer as it reduced
my, uhm, job security since the pretend-database-application ended up
turning into the final product. Cursed FileMaker Pro! God knows how
many coders have hit the unemployment lines thanks to that $#@%^^$#
program, but I digress...

With my upcoming break from law school (see - see what happened - I
switched careers - thanks a lot FileMaker!) I've got another opportunity
to do something similar for a different company, and I remember how
horribly easy it was to work with FileMaker 5.5. I assume 7.0 is the
same - but better.

So... I won't need a "how-to" book, but I still miss the days of when
software products (anyone here remember Paradox before Borland bought
the company - sheezus the manuals came on a forklift) came with big
dense manuals.

I'm going to go for it and buy Developer, and in the end probably end up
getting Apple another site license deal in the process. (sigh).

Does come with pdf's but I bought Filmaker pro7 bible - schwartz and
cohen - although beware because alot of what is in these books are just
expansions on the pdf's.

I've had to do very similar to what you have and apart from teaching
myself and "tweaking"here and there, I've found very useful Filemaker
forums etc that have listed answers to some of my problems.
Cheers